Moving pictures

It only took about 12 solid hours, but I somehow figured out how to produce a 30-minute HD digital video. In some ways Apple has made this process super easy with iMovie ’11, but the device/color/quality output options are completely bewildering and require a crash course in the history of digital audio-visual compression (plus lots of Apple hardware technical specs and a few visits to the Apple store).

Anyway, I couldn’t be happier. This is a slow-scale, full-screen, meditative work. It’s something to enter on your own terms. It’s a 30-minute presentation of the relics (30 of them), each one dissolving into the next. I’m absolutely in love with the dissolves — they add an entirely new dimension to the work, as the relics are juxtaposed (a bit like a slow page-turn in the book, but different). And within each dissolve is a secondary kind of animation — the pixels shimmer and quiver as they move from frame to frame.

There’s no audio, but this will be projected at a large scale in the gallery space while I’m performing the 52 texts. Audio from my visit to the John Cage Trust will also be playing, sometimes distracting from my spoken words, other times barely audible.

3 Comments

Paul,
so proud of you!the more I see the more I hear from your developments the more I am impressed and touched by your commitment and your authenticity!
Sending you my love for the famous event already a few weeks in advance
filakia
yvonne

This is amazing; the transition of the pixels has a viscous, ‘evaporating water’ kind of quality that seems so much like a totally natural phenomenon. That it ’emerged’ from this process seems so ‘in tune’ (maybe pun intended?) with your other discoveries.
Another wonderful thing; I started watching immediately and was ‘hearing’ my own very quiet music/soundscape, thinking that you had soundtracked it, and then I saw your comment you haven’t yet! It was like very faint, tremulous strings, holding one expectant note. But that’s just me I guess. I love the video.